Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I would just like to touch on a couple of items, one is the capital allocation process where we see large sums of money going into renovations of hospitals in larger centres, all because of the 20-year cycle whether it's needed or not. We see a community like Wekweti with nothing but one room which the dentist and the nurse that travels there once a month use. It's just a little room. It's not going to save any lives. All it does is tell somebody they can go there if they have a complaint and see the nurse; they can do that. If the nurse doesn't agree with them, they don't need to go anywhere else to get help. So a lot of people in my riding, by the time they are diagnosed with any serious disease, it's too late to save their lives because of the way this government operates. If they would have had a health facility with the right diagnostic equipment, x-rays and other facilities that can accommodate sick people in their own communities, that is not happening. So looking at the new budget and looking at the way this government is operating, we are not there to save lives. We are there to protect property just because the life cycle is there to upgrade it. So while people are walking down shiny hallways, people are dying in the smaller communities. We can't operate like this anymore. We have to change the way we do these things. We are being blamed for a lot of these things. People in my riding are getting diagnosed with cancer, three months and they are no longer around. They are dying because they haven't been diagnosed in time. People alive in Yellowknife say they beat cancer and they see the big wall with the quilt where a lot of them beat cancer because they were diagnosed in time because they have the facilities. They have the diagnostic equipment and doctors and everybody that can help them. The capital allocation is maybe one step forward so we can put a full-time nurse in one of these communities where a doctor can visit on a regular basis. I am very happy that my riding will get two doctors and in 30 years, maybe they will be able to help us in our communities. If we don't have the facilities to save lives, then we can't save their lives. Running down a shiny hallway compared to saving lives is not the way this government should be going.
This health information toll-free line, I think that should go ahead. It's great that you had this booklet that you are going to give to everybody in the NWT, every household, but how many households can make use of that? There are some households that can't even read that information. We could maybe save a life if we could get somebody on the line with an interpreter on the other end on the phone, but how can you do it just by reading that paper? You can't. Sure, it's good for the larger centres where everybody is well educated. Some of our communities are still living the old, traditional lifestyles where they never went to school at all. They are living off the land. We still have communities like that. So I think this health information toll-free line should be happening and I would truly support that.
Talking about telehealth; it's one of the things I saw a demonstration of and I fully support that. I think we need to put that more into the communities. We can put a little health centre in Wekweti and a telehealth station there. Maybe we can help our constituents. You put one in Colville Lake. They had an accident last year. Someone had to fill out 10 pages of an application form before they would even medevac the patient. So if telehealth was there, it would have helped them a lot.
The other thing with the apprehension of aboriginal children, we see more and more young child welfare workers out there. They are all single. They have never known how to raise a family, how a child works. They don't even know how families work. These are the people put at the frontline to apprehend our children. I saw a case where a caseworker apprehended a child on the say-so of someone else and then later found out that it wasn't the case, but by then it was 45 days into the child care plan system. Some of the activities they do out there is criminal. It's like kidnapping, what they do. They've got protection and law on their side and they feel they can do anything they want. I think we have to have protection for the families who are out there. We are breaking up families for no reason at all. How can we bring the children back to the families if there is a problem in the family? We have no treatment for the parents. Where are we going to take them for treatment? We only have one treatment facility and culturally it doesn't support everyone. It only works for one culture and that's it. If you can't read or write in English, the system there is no good to you. You might as well just be watching a movie and watch people come in and out for 28 days. It's not going to help you at all. You won't understand them. They have no interpreters. The system is flawed.
So you are going to have to start thinking of putting some facilities into the regions where they can culturally help themselves in their own languages. It's time to do prevention instead of building multi-million dollar jails and young offenders' facilities. We should be doing prevention at the frontline and putting facilities in the front instead of at the back end. This government is working backwards as far as I am concerned.
There was $300,000 allocated for a health centre in Wha Ti, which was never spent and nobody knows what is happening there. Can the Minister tell me why the money was not carried over if it wasn't spent? Thank you, Mr. Chairman.